by Anna Bruno
He pulled up the text in front of me on the couch, pushed his phone in my face, and insisted I see it. It read, I’m glad we’re friends again.
I could see how badly he wanted me to care, how he wanted me to act like I did before, say all the catty things: She’s pathetic; she lost her virginity to you. I didn’t; I couldn’t. Turns out cattiness demands the ability to tap into some primal desire to defend and protect. Cattiness requires life force, imagination, and will, all of which were in short supply.
I wanted to feel imposed upon, green with jealousy, another woman’s desires having infringed upon my own, her emotional and physical longings like tentacles, squeezing and choking out the oxygen—fight harder, lose more—but with the awareness that the battle was an easy victory, I had no desire to fight, and beyond battlelust, there was no other deeper desire, no love, or even awareness of love’s possibility. The reflexes of my body and mind were dull and humorless, as if all my remaining energy was being used up, slowly depleted, by one thing and one thing only: survival, a counting of days, perhaps comparable to an alcoholic keeping track of sobriety, or what Catholics call purgatory, a place where time is suspended and desire is thwarted and there is nothing but waiting and waiting and waiting, and implicit in the waiting, a sense that eternal happiness exists someplace else but not here.
“I think we should split up,” I said.
“You mean get a divorce?”
Lucas didn’t care much for institutions. He didn’t like anyone telling him what to do. Labels and titles inspired no confidence in him. He’d asked me to marry him and gone through with it because he knew I wanted it, but I’m sure he saw our bond as something more infinite. He was loyal like Addie, which is to say he possessed a pure kind of loyalty, blind and perfect and defined only by love.
Once we left Addie outside in the backyard for several hours because a simple errand turned into drinks with friends at a rooftop bar. Around six o’clock we rolled up to the house on bikes, and there she was, perched on the front porch, waiting for us. She’d found a hole in the back fence and squeezed through it. She could’ve explored the neighborhood, begged the kids next door for treats, smelled other dogs, but her impulse was to watch over the house and wait for her people. If we hadn’t come home, she would have waited there all night, maybe even for days.
Lucas was the same way. He didn’t care much about the institution of marriage, but he sure as hell cared about divorce.
He stared at the TV. I couldn’t tell if he was thinking about what I just said or watching Family Feud.
By the way the families on the show were dressed, it was obvious that they were working-class, probably with deep roots in this town. One of the families was fat—all three generations, grandmother to grandchild—and the other skinny. Both bounced up and down and clapped to the music.
“I just need to not live here.”
“Because of Angela?” For a second, he must have thought I was joking.
“Because I don’t care about Angela. Because she could have texted you The sex last night was great and I still wouldn’t care about Angela.”
Lucas reclined on the couch, at the base of the L, perpendicular to the TV, his usual spot. It was cool in the house and he hadn’t taken off his puffy jacket or his shoes after he came in from the backyard, so he looked both comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time, both ready for sleep and capable of flight. The way he tucked his chin into the collar of his jacket was both a metaphorical and a literal signal that he was going into his shell.
Lucas’s threshold for arguing was very shallow. For a routine fight, he had about thirty minutes in him. Once we were beyond his threshold, he’d table the conversation and leave the room, picking it up again as many as three days later. He always did pick it up again, though, I think because he had to know that I was okay. Deep down, he was insecure. He carried, in his own words, some degree of self-loathing, but the heavier burden was his fear of losing the one thing that mattered to him: his family.
“I’m not having sex with Angela,” he said.
“I know you’re not, but I wouldn’t care if you did. Knock yourselves out.”
Lucas shook his head and looked away again, first at Addie, then back at the TV. It was his way of dismissing me, his way of saying, If I look away long enough, she’ll get over it. He said, “Game shows are depressing. There’s something creepy about them. Big Brother–ish. A method of control.”
“We had religion; now we have local-access Family Feud.”
“—ist das Opium des Volkes,” he said.
Lucas had introduced me to his parents for the first time at The Final Final, about three months into our relationship. He and his dad wanted to watch some game that wasn’t on regular TV, so we all met at the bar. His mom came along too, but she didn’t like being in the bar much. At some point she expressed her desire to leave. The old man insisted on one more drink, and I heard him whisper, “This is family.” I doubt he remembers that day, the day we first met, let alone his excuse to stick around the bar a little bit longer. It felt so good, though, for a stranger to call me family.
“I don’t feel what I’m supposed to feel,” I said. Before these words came out of my mouth, I hadn’t thought about them at all. They were spontaneous, not premeditated, which was characteristic of breakup conversations, in my experience. But these were the only words that mattered. These were the truest words, which best approximated the reality we were living in. The irony, of course, was that these words were also meaningless because there was really no way I was supposed to feel, so the fact that I didn’t feel it, well, then, so what? I didn’t, for example, say, I don’t feel the way I used to feel, which meant something specific because I remembered exactly how I used to feel. But there was something about the negation of an intangible that seemed almost truer than my physical and psychological reality; it was truer than true.
“You’re depressed,” he said. “We can make an appointment with—”
“I don’t love you anymore,” I said, and we both knew no doctor could fix that.
A few days later, I moved out of the house on Catherine Street. It was Lucas’s house. It always was. Never mind all the sweat equity, all the memories, the three months of living without a wall.
* * *
WHEN I HIRED A lawyer, Lucas said, “Why do we need a lawyer? You can have whatever you want.” I insisted so he said, “I’ll just use the same guy. He can do both sides, right?” I told him that would be a conflict of interest. I said it flatly, like a pragmatist.
“Have your guy do the work and I’ll sign it,” he said.
Sharing Addie with Lucas wasn’t an option. It was too difficult for us to communicate, even through text message, even if the matter was entirely logistical. Seeing each other was like the worst migraine I’d ever had, the kind where my brain pushed against my skull until it was ready to explode, except instead of physical, it was emotional.
As we walked into the lawyer’s office, I looked Lucas in the eye. “I’m not doing this to punish you,” I said. “I need Addie. Without her I’d stop breathing.”
The lawyer said something about there being other matters to discuss. I said, “Lucas can have the house and whatever’s in the joint account.”
“We can split the joint account,” he said.
“Use the money on the house, Lucas. Hire a painter.” The exterior of the house badly needed repainting. He’d finished only the porch and a primer coat on the trim. He stopped working on the house altogether after that.
Lucas was entitled to more than the house and the joint account. There were the royalties from the book, which I wrote while we were married and Lucas supported me, the book that he suggested I write, for one thing, and our portfolio of stocks and bonds. He’d get half of that too. It was all there in the paperwork. Lucas was aware of our financial situation, though not actively involved in the maintenance of the accounts.
He had no desire to claim ownership in the hedge fund,
which Grace and I managed as general partners. At one point, my lawyer stopped and asked him if he was sure he did not want to hire his own representation.
Addie was the only thing for which I cared to fight. I had prepared a file with ample documentation: receipts for dog food, a statement from a neighbor attesting that I ran her daily, a note from our veterinarian acknowledging that I took her in twice in the last year, for a checkup and shots.
Of course, Lucas’s name was on the application for the dog license. He rescued her from a local animal hospital, where a family had left her after she’d been hit by a car because they couldn’t pay the bill. Lucas had a friend who worked there (of course he did—he had friends everywhere in this town), and she called him and told him she had a dog for him, and he agreed to take her. No one knew her name, so he called her Adelaide, a nod to her homeland. He watched while they mended her up and put a purple cast on her broken leg. He made sure she was up-to-date on all her shots. He paid the tab. Then he took her home and raised her as a puppy. Facts are facts.
When I pushed my folder across the table to Lucas, he said, “She’s my dog,” and then he corrected himself. “She’s ours—”
He bit his lower lip. My preparedness was gratuitous. A collection of receipts and statements from outsiders were meaningless to Lucas. He had been there, after all. He was an insider. I’d known this all along. I knew it when I riffled through my receipt drawer and when I asked the neighbor to put everything in writing and when I drove to the vet’s office. But it was Lucas’s expression, the way he bit his lip, that made me realize why I did it.
I did it to prove my fastidiousness. I did it to show I was the one who obsessed over details: whether the bottles were disinfected, if we had enough diapers in the bag, whether the stove had been turned off, checking everything two and three times over. I did it to show how much I worried all the time: about whether my breasts produced enough milk and, if they did, whether my diet provided the right nutrients, and when we switched to formula, about antibodies, and about preventing him from sleeping on his stomach, and grapes and maraschino cherries, and the possibility of climbing up on the toilet and cracking his head on the tub.
I did it to show, as a mother, I was mentally ensconced by paranoia and guilt and longing, and, as a father, Lucas was not. And though Addie had belonged to him first, and he had known her longer, and maybe she loved him more, I was the one who should care for her.
I did it, ultimately, to blur the edges of my own guilt.
The look on my lawyer’s face screamed, Give the man his dog, but I was paying him so he couldn’t say that.
“I spend most of the day with her,” I said, “while you’re out at jobsites.”
“You travel for work,” he said.
“Not anymore. I’m done.”
Lucas leaned forward on the table, reaching for my hand. I pulled it back into my lap. He said, “You wouldn’t stay home when our son was alive and now you won’t leave home.”
The lawyer’s office was dry from the forced-air heat. I took a sip from a water glass, not recalling when it had been placed in front of me. Then Lucas said something that, in the moment, I found cruel. “What are you going to do when Addie dies?”
I let all the rage rise from my belly. “At least this time I’ll be prepared.”
Teardrops leaked from his eyes. I knew those wide, briolette eyes so intimately, the way he focused them and pondered with them and rolled them. I’d never seen him cry before, not even at the funeral.
The lawyer was both in the room and not in the room, as if Lucas and I were floating in a bubble, and the lawyer was a silent observer. He occasionally jotted notes on his legal pad.
Inside the bubble, Lucas looked down at his hands in the way one does when he is about to confess a sin. We floated away together, backward in time.
“It’s my fault,” Lucas said. “It’s all my fault. You kept telling me to put him down in the crib. But he was so sleepy, and he wanted Addie to curl up next to him on the bed.”
“Lucas,” I said. “Let’s not—” I covered my heart with my hand.
I already knew everything I needed to know. Earlier in the day Lucas and Jimmy accessed the porch roof from the window in Lion’s room so they could paint the trim before the weather turned. I wasn’t there to help. When they finished the primer coat, they climbed back inside but left the window open, out of carelessness or laziness, perhaps because they would need to go out there again to clean up. I wasn’t there to close the window. Jimmy was still at the house when Lucas’s mom dropped Lion off after watching him for the morning, and she told Lucas she had just changed his diaper and he was sleepy from the car ride and ready for his midafternoon nap. Lucas carried Lionel upstairs and laid him down on the bed instead of the crib. I wasn’t there to insist on the crib. Lucas and Addie stayed on the bed with Lion until they were sure he was asleep. Then Lucas joined Jimmy in the backyard for beers—I knew that too. They left the back door open so they could hear if Lion woke up and cried out, and Addie could move freely between the front of the house, where she liked to perch on the back of the chair to watch passersby, and the backyard, where she could be near them. They listened to a sports talk radio show on a small, portable speaker, just as Lucas did every day. All of this I knew; the rest I imagined.
Martin Yagla was with them too. I didn’t know it that day in the lawyer’s office, though. I found that out tonight.
“Addie saw him fall,” Lucas said. “I know she did. She saw him from the front window.”
“She’s a dog, Lucas.”
Lucas went on to describe the way Addie threw herself against the front door, the way she madly scraped at the wood with her claws. Her loud, sharp, persistent bark. He said, “At first I thought it was just the mailman at the door. I put my beer down and walked inside. Addie’s body writhed. She thrashed against the door. I yelled for her to calm down.”
His eyes remained fixed on his hands. He rubbed them together like someone applying lotion aggressively. He tugged on his wedding band.
He described Lion’s little body, face up, arms outstretched, like a snow angel on our redbrick walkway. He described how he held Lion in his arms while Jimmy held Addie back with one hand and dialed 911 with the other. The doctors said Lionel’s head hit first.
“Lucas, stop.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the thing he needed me to say: It wasn’t your fault. Deep down I blamed him.
“Emma—”
“Do we have to do this now? In front of Doug? I’m paying him a lot of money to sit here and listen to this.”
“Our lawyer’s name is Doug?” Lucas looked at him, acknowledging him for the first time.
“No, Lucas, my lawyer’s name is Doug. You don’t have a lawyer.”
Doug became very uncomfortable when we started talking about him. I’m sure he’d experienced worse, being a divorce attorney.
“How cliché,” Lucas said. “You hired an attorney named Doug.”
“What do you care what his name is?”
“It’s just fucked up. Doug is the final arbiter of a great love.”
“Doug isn’t the arbiter of anything, Lucas.” The lawyer was completely frozen. He wasn’t sure whether he should agree with me or if I had insulted him.
“The point is,” Lucas said, “and I don’t care how much you’re paying this guy, he’s going to hear it—the point is that I am the one who put Lionel down on the bed. I am the one who didn’t think about the window. I am the one who went out back for a beer. Addie saw everything.”
“What’s your point, Lucas?” My hand hit the table. I wasn’t in control of it.
“You don’t know what it was like,” Lucas said. “You weren’t there.”
Doug finally worked up the confidence to cut in, or maybe he just had another unhappy couple on their way in. Whatever his motivation was, he finally said, “I think I have what I need to finish up the paperwork.”
“Addie saw him fall,” Lucas repeated, a
nd I knew what he did not know. It didn’t matter whether Addie saw Lionel fall. It mattered that Lucas saw him fall through her eyes, and he would continue to see him fall for the rest of his life.
* * *
RIGHT NOW, ADDIE IS sleeping on my bed. She has pulled back the quilt so she can curl up in my soft French linens. Lest I’ve led you to believe Addie is a good dog, let me clarify. Addie wants to be a good dog—strong is her desire to please—but she’s not. She can’t control her impulses, which are to eat everything and smell everything and chase everything. When I call her to come, she takes her sweet time. When I leave food on the counter, she snatches it as soon as she finds herself alone. She once slipped out the front door and forced the delivery guy into a full sprint through the yard, barking as he leapt into his truck, headfirst. Long after she could be called a puppy, she chewed through my laptop cord and my Bose headphones cord, which seemed targeted, the fact that she chose those two things, one that I use for work and the other for travel, her dual enemies, but I can’t imagine she’s that smart, just bored.
Every now and again, a friend will find me out with Addie and, having seen her develop over the years from a spry puppy to a languorous old girl, will say, “Have you thought about getting another dog?” No one ever completes the thought: It might soften the blow when she dies. People say this out of genuine concern, so I don’t hold it against them, but I know another dog would not diminish my grief but add to it. Addie is the only dog I’ve ever had. I begged for one as a child, but my mother was such a constrained germophobe that a dog was a practical impossibility. On my own, I moved around too much, lived in rentals without yards, and was, perhaps, too capricious to slow down for the love of a creature. The fact that Lucas dropped Addie into my life was pure, dumb luck, or possibly fate, because I could not have chosen a more loyal companion from any shelter in the world. Someday I might find myself with another dog but not while Addie is still with me.
